Museum of Vancouver

The Museum of Vancouver (MOV), located on Chestnut Street at Vanier Park in the neighbourhood of Kitsilano. It is Canada’s largest civic museum in and Vancouver’s oldest, having been founded in 1894 by the museum in Art, Historical, and Scientific Association of Vancouver.

The MOV has undergone several iterations and was known in its early years as the Vancouver Museum and later as the Centennial Museum before it was rebranded as Museum of Vancouver in 2009. It was originally located at the Dunn Building on Granville Street and was moved to the top floor of the Carnegie Library in 1905.

The museum’s present building in Vanier Park was built in 1967 and was designed by Gerald Hamilton, a disciple of New Formalism school of architecture. The museum’s building plan was expanded to include a planetarium, following a generous donation by lumber magnate H.R. MacMillan. In recognition of the donor, the added planetarium was named as the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre.

Hamilton added to his building plan a distinctive roof design patterned after the woven basket hat of the Northwest Coast’s First Nations folks. Vancouverites found the building iconic and nicknamed it as “the Taj Mahal on the creek”.

The building features reflecting pools with curved pedestrian bridges across these architectural accents. The most distinguishable characteristic of the building, however, is its sweeping conical shape that makes it associated more to the planetarium rather than to the MOV.

The reality though is that the museum’s 45,000 square feet of space in the building is much larger than the planetarium’s 4,000-square-foot exhibit space.

The MOV has a large collection of artifacts, which are nationally significant but most are in storage in a nearby building because of lack of exhibit space. The museum’s collections include items celebrating the Pacific Northwest Coast First Nations’ culture, such as totem poles, baskets, masks, boxes, bowls, canoes, carvings, and regalia.

The museum also displays Oriental artifacts from its large collection of these items. These memorabilia include Chinese art objects dating back to the Shang dynasty. The MOV is also a custodian of Japanese artifacts like ceramics, ivory carvings, and armor dating from the Muromachi period.

Mr Lawn Installation and Landscaping Vancouver

Continuing our journey to explore notable destinations in Vancouver bc, let’s now venture into the dynamic and lively community of Kitsilano Beach Park.